Mr. McEwan and Mrs. Woolf: How a Saturday in February Follows “This Moment of June”

It is now rather commonplace to assert that contemporary British literature does not really engage with modernism. Whether or not critics contend that the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s were “a time of literary effort and respectable activity” that nonetheless “lacked the dominating literary voices needed to make a superlative age” (Holman and Harmon 142), they implicitly agree that the apparent diminishment of experiment and overt formalism in an influential collocation of mid-century works has had a lasting influence on contemporary British literature. Despite the modulation over time of the anti-modern stance of the so-called Angry Young Men and purported followers of the Movement, the writers’ initial claims have been and continue to be utilized as evidence that British writing retreated from the very modernism that would flourish in America after the Second World War. Alan Sinfield’s historicized account of the reinvention of modernism as a foreign tradition in postwar Britain helps to explain why experimental writers like Angela Carter are still defined as outliers with seemingly anomalous interest in Continental philosophy, and even why the celebrated novelist-critic David Lodge would map his literary “crossroad” in such a particular way: his two paths are possible only if modernism is not presented as a viable literary through-way for the English novelist. Amy J. Elias attempts to place a positive spin on this anomalous positioning and transform the Lodgeian divergence into an aesthetic convergence, but her clever designation “postmodern realism” tends to reinforce the same critical argument—that contemporary British literature elides modernism altogether.

While no doubt there is an antimodern strain in some contemporary British literature, it would be misleading to classify all critiques of modernism as implied rejections of the movement. The plain style and comedic tone of an academic novel like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, for example, may deflate perceived modernist pretensions, yet the metafictive musings and encyclopedic references of another titularly realist academic text, A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, actually vindicate the modernist theories that they purportedly undercut. Apparent returns to realism are just as likely to be recognitions of the ways in which, in Richard Bradford’s words, modern practitioners offered “an alternative form of realism, something which exposed the naturalistic techniques of the nineteenth century as hidebound and self-limiting” (4–5), as they are retreats from the excesses of modernist experimentation. Indeed, a significant number of the critical reinvestigations of modernism in contemporary British literature could be said to be generative in nature, as they offer a way to reconceive literary praxis for the current era. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) is one obvious example. Few studies may place the novel in its full modern context (Brian Finney’s and Richard Robinson’s articles are exceptions), but critics nonetheless note that the author is returning to a perceived literary past and correcting its endemic errors in order to fashion a more productive future. What the extant scholarship on McEwan does not fully register is that the author’s productive re-creation of modern modes continues in Saturday (2005), a novel that reimagines Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in order to recalibrate the focus of “modern fiction” for contemporary times.¹ This novel, even more so than Atonement, “takes the original principles of Modernism and reapplies them, highlighting vision as opposed to formalism” (Childish and Thomson, “Remodernism” n. pag.), in a complex reworking of Woolf’s “proper stuff of fiction” (“Modern Fiction” 106).

The early reviews of Saturday offer some clues as to why McEwan’s novel has yet to be placed in its proper modern context: critics lack the language that would help them identify generative critiques of modernism in contemporary British literature. Extended references to modernist works are assumed to be homages, an assumption that does little to help a critic explain how a novel like McEwan’s could criticize what it also seeks to recover in Woolf’s writing. It is thus no accident that even a perceptive reviewer like Katie Roiphe is unable to formulate any particular import for...